CMS Spotlight: A Detailed Craft CMS Review

With 20 years of experience in crafting websites, campaigns and digital strategies for our clients, it’s fair to say our team has seen our share of CMS (Content Management Systems.) Over this time, we have developed a killer eye for what features comprise an effective CMS, allowing us to achieve the best results for us, and our clients.

Craft CMS has been our go-to platform since 2016, when we decided to rebuild our own site using it. Since then, we haven’t looked back! That is why we wanted to share our in-depth, transparent review of our experience with Craft so you can make up your own mind!

Is Craft CMS Right for your Business?

The first version of Craft CMS was released in 2013 and was created to be an alternative to the likes of WordPress. It has since established itself as a real thought-leader in the market. In 2017, Craft was selected as the Best WordPress Alternative in CMS Critic’s People’s Choice Awards.

Wordpress vs. Craft

If you are considering moving away from Wordpress, or trying to decide which CMS right for you, we have selected the eight major CMS features of both CMS platforms to help you decide which one is right for you.

Customisable Dashboard

Many of the CMS dashboards found on the marketplace today are brimming with endless options, tabs and admin pages that most users will never use. This can make navigating the CMS difficult and speaking from past experience, often confusing.

In Craft, we are able to curate our own admin area to fit our specific needs. The default admin panel is simple and doesn’t include any unnecessary features that you won’t need, however, you still have the ability to compose the admin area by enabling only the features you want to use.

Easy-to-use Control Panel

Craft CMS has an easy to use and responsive control panel, making it a breeze to navigate, make changes and add new content like I am doing from our control panel right now! The admin area is even available on tablet and mobile devices, so you can edit your website on the go and make any last minute changes.

Matrix & Custom Fields

The Matrix field is one of the most powerful features of Craft CMS making it incredibly easy to set up the website exactly how you need it. Developers can create reusable blocks of fields to construct complex page layouts. Craft CMS websites can take full advantage of the Matric block architecture, where each component that uses Matrix blocks performs a special function.

The matrix system makes life easier for content writers too as it allows you to drag and drop sections of a page, which is particularly useful for long blog posts or articles. The latest version, Craft 4, gives you conditional fields for more efficient workflows for website editors. These condition fields allow elements to be visible or editable only when certain conditions are met.

​Live Preview & Revision History

Crafting engaging and informative content doesn’t doesn’t just happen, it takes time and often many drafts (even if you are using Chat GPT.) On Craft CMS you can view your changes in live preview as soon as you make them, giving you the chance to see how your changes will look before you publish them on the live version of your website.

If you do publish changes that you don't like (or you make a mistake) it's incredibly easy to switch back to the previous look draft before anyone even notices. With Craft CMS, you can view and revert back to any previous version of that page with a simple click.

Other CMS features

1. One-click updating: You can keep your Craft CMS and all the plugins up to date with the latest fixes, features and security enhancements with one click.
2. User & Permissions: Adding and removing users is easy from the admin area. You can assign users to a user group and give each user group specific permissions.
3. Entry types: This feature allows you to manage multiple content types together in one single section. Each type gets its own field type and a custom name.
4. Auto-refreshing for elements: When you update an element, any related browser tabs you have open, get notified and automatically refresh.
5. Element index state linking: Element index pages keep the URL updates with selected status and sort options.

Security

If you are thinking of making the switch to Craft CMS, you can be rest assured that your site will be secure. Craft requires PHP 7.0+ which is actively maintained and regularly patched. Craft CMS automatically helps to prevent direct socket connections to your site by denying requests to start a session that don’t present a user agent string or IP address, which is critical for the security of your business.

Through the use of PDO code, SQL injections are prevented which is essential for protecting your classified information hosted on your site. Pixel and Tonic have outlined the full specifications around security on their website.

What’s Craft Commerce?

• Craft Commerce is a powerful ecommerce platform that is built exclusively for Craft CMS, by the same developers.
• Craft Commerce offers an easy to use, flexible admin administration control panel alongside the ability to build bespoke e-commerce stores for clients.
• We do recommend you are confident with Craft CMS Before installing Craft Commerce.
• Craft Commerce & the licence is around £800.
• Craft Commerce is very plug-in friendly allowing for a variety of e-commerce features with the click of a button.
• Payment integrations are simple for customers
• Integrated storefront, dynamic pricing, order index and easy to implement subscription models.

​Why do Eyekiller use Craft CMS?

As an Approved Craft Partner our developers are passionate about the capabilities of Craft as it has been built with them in mind, giving them full control of the creative process. We choose Craft as our CMS of choice for projects of all sizes and have relied on it as a foundation for everything from highly customised enterprise level websites to elegantly simple landing pages. Whether it’s a complex data migration or custom API integration, we have done it all with Craft and are proud of the results.

Craft CMS is trusted by corporations like Microsoft, Apple, Reddit, Adobe, BigCommerce, Netflix, AT&T, McDonald’s, and Dell, plus numerous government, financial, and educational organisations so we are in good company!

As an Approved Craft Partner we believe that this cms enables us to achieve the best results for us, and our clients. If you are interested in having a conversation about getting a website built, you can see how we do this for our amazing clients by talking to us.